


Ghost in the Machine

by beeezie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Community: HPFT, Dark, Depression, Friendship, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 01:26:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4202736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeezie/pseuds/beeezie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not a fairy tale. It's about a girl who didn't have a fairy godmother to make her sane again.</p><p>This is what happened to Lavender after the war.</p><p>  <i>HPFF Featured Story: May 2012</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. St. Mungo's

Some people had lived through the war. Other people had died in it.  
  
And some people were left somewhere in the middle.  
  
Lavender Brown was one of them. She didn’t have much interest in living, these days, but she wasn’t dead, either. She had woken up in St. Mungo’s at some point after the war had been won, and had continued to wake up in St. Mungo’s every morning since.  
  
And every night, she dreamt about battle.  
  
She dreamt about standing up in defense of Harry, and making the decision to fight rather than flee. She dreamt about seeing her classmates struck down by curses and taken out by monsters. She dreamt about stunning a giant spider with Seamus, and about jinxing a death eater who went flying into a wall and had probably broken his neck. She dreamt about the explosions, and the terror and exhilaration that accompanied them.  
  
She dreamt of the sound of glass shattering, and of feeling the sudden sting of the shards sinking into her flesh. She dreamt of slipping off the balcony, of the pain in her back when she’d landed, and then of absolute agony as something she could not properly see clawed and tore at her face and neck.  
  
She had hoped at first that it was all a nightmare, and that soon she would just wake up in her four-poster bed in Gryffindor tower. Dumbledore would still be alive. You-Know-Who would not have returned. It would be just another morning and just another day of lessons.  
  
But it was not a nightmare. Any hope that it was had faded as she’d woken up, morning after morning, to the reflection of her mangled face in the mirror and the sight of the scarring from the glass on her arm.  
  
So Lavender had withdrawn. Her friends had come to see her, and she would ignore them.  
  
It had not really been a conscious decision. It had just happened.  
  
There’d been a small part of her that whispered at her to open her mouth. To say anything at all. There’d been a small part of her that felt like she should talk to someone, should be reaching out.  
  
But a bigger part of her simply hadn’t been able to. Just the thought of doing so left her paralyzed by an anxiety that coursed through her and left her feeling even worse than she had before.  
  
It was a miserable sensation to feel, so she stopped trying.  
  
She stopped acknowledging the presence of others in the room. They’d had the special Mind Healers in to look at her, and they’d spoken outside and in the corner in hushed voices while darting worried glances her way. They’d tried to give her potions, but they never seemed to help.  
  
Sometimes, they even made it worse.  
  
Eventually, the Healers gave up on her. They moved her to the permanent ward, where she sat in her bed starting off into space or (very occasionally) wandering aimlessly around the room, trying to find something she had lost.  
  
And most of her friends had slowly but surely stopped visiting.   
  


* * *

  
  
  
“Lavender, just talk to me.” Lavender looked at the girl in front of her, whose face was covered in tears. She knew on some level that this girl was a friend. If she tried, she could probably have remembered the girl’s name.  
  
But Lavender did not want to try. She did not have the energy to try.  
  
Eventually the girl left. She had squeezed Lavender’s hand before she got up and said, “I’ll be back in a few days.”  
  
Lavender did not understand why this girl kept coming back. She also did not understand why the boy with the blond hair kept coming back. She was not sure why they kept begging her to talk to them. There was a small part of her that felt vaguely curious, but most of her did not care, because ultimately, it did not matter.  
  
Lavender did not talk to anyone, because there was nothing to talk about. She was happy to drift away.  
  
She wanted to escape the nightmare. When she closed her eyes at night, she could still smell the blood. She could still remember the teeth ripping into her face, and the claws that looked somehow human digging into her neck.  
  
They said that the war was over. They said that she was safe.  
  
She did not understand why that was supposed to matter. She was not afraid. She was empty.  
  
One day, the boy snapped.  
  
“You can hear me. I know you can hear me. I know you can understand me.”  
  
Lavender stared at him blankly, clenching the bedsheets in her hands and ignoring the pit in her stomach.  
  
“The war sucked for you. Congratulations. It sucked for a lot of people. You know Ron? His brother died. You remember Professor Lupin? He’s gone. Colin Creevey? In the year below us?” She felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and blinked them away. “Yeah, he’s dead too.” The boy spit the words out.  
  
Lavender kept her eyes on the sheets, refusing to meet his eyes.  
  
“There are a lot of people who are dead. You’re not. Be happy for that and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”  
  
It was impossible at that point to just blink away the tears. They started to flow down her cheeks.  
  
“You’ve been in here for more than a year. Don’t you think it’s about time you faced the world?” He shook his head. “The Lavender _I_ knew was a lot of things, but coward wasn’t one of them.”  
  
He’d been speaking fairly softly, but the Healer on duty had noticed something. Lavender did not know whether it was the boy’s reddened face or her tears that had first alerted the Healer to the scene. “You’re upsetting her,” the Healer had hissed. “You’re going to need to leave.”  
  
Lavender watched him storm out, and wondered if he would ever be back again. Then she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to care, and was surprised to find that she did.  
  
Only a little, though.  
  
It would occur to Lavender much later that if this had been one of those stories that she and her friends had loved when they were still in school, before all of this had happened, that would have been enough to snap her out of her spell. They would have had a tearful conversation, she would have apologized for everything, and she would have been released.  
  
But this wasn’t one of those stories, and this did not have a fairy tale ending. Lavender no longer believed in fairy tale endings, because fairy tales did not involve getting your face ripped off and having no fairy godmother to make you pretty again. In fairy tales, the heroine didn’t get shut up in the permanent ward. And if she did, it certainly wasn’t for her own good.  
  
No, this was not a fairy tale, and Lavender did not bounce back to who she used to be. She remained still and quiet and removed the next time the girl visited her, and the time after that.  
  
She was surprised when the boy came back. He spoke to her like he usually had. They always talked about news and gossip. She did not fully process any of it, but neither of them ever seemed to expect her to respond. She wondered why they kept trying.  
  
When he was ready to leave, he gave her a tentative hug and whispered, “I’m sorry.” He pulled back, and she knew she needed to respond in some way. Not because he was expecting it, but because he deserved it.  
  
So she gave him a small smile and shrugged her shoulders a little. He smiled back and hugged her again.  
  
It was a terrifying moment. It had been even harder than she’d expected to push herself to make that one quick, small gesture. It had felt like she was teetering on the edge of a precipice, feeling a growing pit in her stomach as it threatened to swallow her whole.  
  
When he got up to leave, her heart was hammering in her chest.  
  
But as the days passed, the anxiety that had accompanied the single action had begun to fade, and left in its place was a tiny grain of hope.  
  
The next time the girl came, Lavender tried to smile at her, but either the girl did not notice or Lavender did not manage it. After awhile – Lavender wasn’t sure how long, because she was no longer very good at keeping track of time for the simple reason that she had no reason to care – the girl had grabbed the shopping bag beside her and taken out a stuffed unicorn.  
  
That reminded Lavender of the unicorns from her lessons at school. They seemed so long ago, but one of her most vivid memories was of the pretty unicorn foal and it letting her touch it.  
  
This unicorn was also gold.  
  
She took it from the girl and stroked its mane. The girl looked so gratified that Lavender could not quite understand it, and she took one of Lavender’s hands and squeezed it. “I’ll be back Thursday,” she promised. Lavender squeezed back, and the girl gave her a sharp look. “I hope that means you’re still in there somewhere, Lav,” she said softly. “I miss you.”  
  
When the girl left, Lavender curled up in her bed and clutched her new unicorn and cried.  
  
She was not really sure why she was crying. She wasn’t sad. She certainly wasn’t happy.  
  
She also did not care enough to figure it out.  
  
The next few visits, Lavender practiced her smiling. She was surprised to find that it got easier the more she did it, and she did not quite understand why her friends seemed so elated by such a small gesture.  
  
One day, the girl came in with her eyes sparkling. Lavender was surprised that she noticed anything about the girl’s eyes. She could not remember the last time such a small detail had registered.  
  
The girl sat down and talked to Lavender. Lavender made an effort to smile at all the right parts. She was not sure whether she succeeded, but trying seemed to be enough. That was the nice thing about being locked up. You got lots of points for trying.  
  
After awhile, the girl glanced at the clock. Lavender assumed that meant that she would be leaving, but after a moment, the girl said in a rush, “And Seamus asked me out yesterday.”  
  
Lavender felt that tug at something inside of her – some long forgotten memory. She remembering sitting with this girl and talking and giggling as though it had been another life.  
  
In a lot of ways, she supposed, it had been.  
  
She hugged the girl, mustered up all her strength, and whispered, “Congratulations.”  
  
The girl jerked back, her eyes wide. Lavender offered her another small smile.  
  
The girl burst into tears. Lavender was vaguely aware of the Healer hovering near the bed, but she only had so much energy to spend on details, and right now she was using it all to pat the girl on the back.  
  
When she finally calmed down, she had hugged Lavender so hard Lavender found it difficult to breathe. “Thank you,” she said.  
  
There was so much feeling loaded into those words that Lavender felt so overwhelmed that she did not respond to anything for several days. She did not know what happened in those days. She was vaguely aware of activity around her, but she did not process any of it.  
  
She did not know how long it was after the girl’s visit that the boy came back. He was gossipy than the girl was, and Lavender knew that he had a shorter temper. She was therefore not very surprised when he didn’t talk for very long about mundane things before he said, “Parvati said you spoke to her last week.” Lavender nodded, and he sighed. “Does that mean that part of you is still in there?”  
  
Lavender hugged her unicorn close and considered how to answer that. After some deliberation, she shrugged. “I’m not the same,” she said, but her voice was so low she was not surprised when he looked crestfallen.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said. He probably thought that she could not repeat herself. “I couldn’t hear you.”  
  
She summoned all of her willpower and repeated, a bit louder, “I’m not the same.”  
  
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, there were tears in them. This surprised Lavender a little. Usually it was the girl that cried. “I know you’re not,” he said. “No one expects you to be. We just want you to come back.” She had exhausted her ability to talk, but he seemed to understand that. After talking to her for a little longer, he moved from the chair that always seemed to be in the same place to her bed and hugged her. “We miss you,” he said. “And we know that this is hard.”  
  
She moved the unicorn to the side so it did not get squished before hugging him back.  
  
She did not want to squish her unicorn.  
  



	2. Nightmares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's out of St. Mungo's, but the nightmares just won't stop.

It had taken a real, concentrated effort for Lavender to get herself out of St. Mungo’s. There had been the struggle of convincing the Healers that she was capable of taking care of herself, which had involved getting to the point where she _could_ reliably take care of herself.

Which had in turn been much easier said than done.

But she’d managed it. She’d gotten better.

In a fairy tale, better would have meant all the way better. In a fairy tale, she would sleep like a baby.

But Lavender’s sleep was always haunted by nightmares, and tonight was no exception.

She sat bolt upright in bed. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it in her throat. Her eyes darted around the room, fixating on all the shadows lurking near the walls and by the closet door. The light reflecting off the glowing orb on her bedside table just wasn’t bright enough to illuminate them all.

She would need to get a new one.

Lavender grabbed her wand off her bedside table. “Lumos,” she muttered, and her wand gave off a faint flash before flickering out.

Nightmares could be worse than dementors for actually managing to cast a spell.

Lavender took a deep breath. “Lumos,” she tried again, and this time the room lit up. Predictably, none of the shadows had been anything but shadows. They never were.

She lay her wand on the bed and wrapped her arms around herself. “You’re fine,” she muttered to herself as her body trembled with barely-suppressed terror. “You’re fine. You’re fine. There’s nothing here.”

A gust of wind outside rattled her window suddenly. She started violently, despite knowing, deep down, that there was nothing on the other side.

The shadow that had been hunting her in her dream was not real. It did not exist in the real world. It was neither outside her bedroom door nor outside her window. The heavy locks and enchantments were unnecessary. She knew all of that, too.

But knowing something is different than feeling something, and knowing all of that logically did not stop her stomach from leaping into her throat when she heard a slight creak outside her bedroom door.

She grabbed her wand off her bed and pointed it toward the sound, though she was sure that she would be unable to perform any spells in her current state, even if there was a real threat skulking around the shadows of her flat.

There wasn’t, of course. It was just the wind and the sounds of an old house settling. There was nothing waiting in the night to attack her.

“You did not leave St. Mungo’s to have panic attacks,” she said through clenched teeth, the frustration mounting along with the fear. She was tired of nightmares. She was tired of the panic attacks that followed them. She was tired of being too terrified of the darkness and what she couldn’t seem to leave her room before the morning sun flooded her flat with light. She was tired of being too afraid to look at the windows after sunset.

Just the idea of it made her heart start racing.

She glanced at the clock. It was almost 5am.

That wasn’t so bad. Sunrise was only about an hour away. She could deal with that.

Her heart still pounding, she got out of bed and padded across the room to the bookshelf. When a floorboard squeaked beneath her foot, she jumped.

“Calm down,” she said. At least there was no one to hear her talking to herself.

She plucked a worn, dog-eared copy of a book off the shelf and settled into a chair in the corner. She liked this chair. She could glance up and see the entire room from it.

Nothing could take her by surprise.

* * *

Lavender had never really been afraid of the dark before the Battle of Hogwarts. She had vague memories of being uncomfortable in it as a small child, but she’d gotten over that long before she’d started at school. Parvati had been – she’d had a globe on her bedside table well into their third year – but Lavender hadn’t really understood why. They were in Hogwarts. There was nothing to really be afraid of.

She’d gotten a little more nervous in her seventh year, because then there _had_ been something to be afraid of, especially with just her and Parvati in the dormitory. They’d taken to sneaking up into the boys’ dormitory more nights than not and sleeping in the beds that had been abandoned by Ron, Harry, and Dean, and the addition of Seamus and Neville had been more than enough to quell the fear.

But then had come the battle, and St. Mungo’s, and since then, things had been different.

For some reason, she’d thought that leaving St. Mungo’s would help the nightmares. She’d expected not being surrounded by other people to really improve her sleep troubles and her fears.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. It hadn’t really gotten worse, but it hadn’t gotten better, either. She had stagnated. She was at a standstill. She’d been out for almost a year, and she was in more or less the same shape she’d been in when she’d left.

And that made her want to scream.

Something clearly wasn’t working. Something clearly needed to change.

But what that something was, she had no idea.

She knew that sitting alone in her flat wasn’t really helping her, but she didn’t really want to go out, either.

People just gawked at her whenever she did.

Parvati had offered to get her in with the Aurors, but Lavender had absolutely no desire to be an Auror. She’d had enough of dark wizards for a lifetime, and even if she hadn’t, a high profile office filled with her old classmates – none of whom she had any special desire to spend much time with – was not exactly what she had in mind.

Ron Weasley had offered to put in a word for her at his brother’s joke shop, but Lavender had no desire to work there, either. Loud noises made her jump, and she’d been in the shop enough to know that things were constantly exploding in it.

Then Parvati’s sister had suggested she join Dragon Research. The bright side of joining Dragon Research would be that she’d have a good shot at not always being the most scarred person in the room. However, given that the downside was that Lavender really didn’t care about dragons at all, she’d passed on that, too.

Since all of that, she’d had even less of a desire to go out and socialize. She knew what everyone was saying behind her back – that if she wasn’t going to bother to even try any of the suggestions, she had no one but herself to blame.

Because apparently, turning down three high-profile jobs was enough for them to make that kind of judgment about her.

What did they know?

A rap on her door distracted her from her thoughts. She checked through the peephole to see who it was before yanking the door open. “Long time no see,” she said to Seamus, offering him a hug.

It hadn’t been, really, but when you spent the day sitting at home recording prophecies, time tended to pass slowly.

He hugged her back. “Hey.”

She jerked her head toward her living room. “Want to sit down?” He shrugged and followed her into the room, where he settled onto one of the chairs.

“How are you?” he asked.

Lavender considered lying, but decided that it wasn’t worth it. He’d probably see through it, anyway.

“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

Seamus sighed. “Anything I can do?”

She shook her head and settled onto the couch. “I think I need a brighter globe, that’s all.”

“I’ll tell Parvati. She can bring one when she comes over tomorrow,” he said. Lavender was torn between thanking him and telling him that it really wasn’t necessary, she could get her own globe. He seemed to see the conflict on her face, because he added, “It’s really not a big deal. I think she has one from just after the war in a drawer somewhere.”

“Oh. Okay.” She did not have the energy to waste on protesting if they already had one. Of course, Seamus could also be lying, but she didn’t have the energy to waste on thinking too hard about it, either. She eyed him carefully. Somehow, she had the impression that he was not simply here for her company. “This isn’t a social call, is it?” she asked.

He grinned ruefully. “Not really.”

“What’s going on, then?”

Seamus leaned forward. “How much do you know about the new division at the Ministry I’ve been helping to set up?”

Lavender looked up at the ceiling as she thought. “Not much,” she said after a moment. “I know it’s supposed to deal with dark creatures. That’s about it.”

“It’s officially off the ground,” he said. When he said that, she thought she could see where this was going. “I want you to join it.”

She considered that for a moment. “Seamus, you do know that I have panic attacks, right?” It was a rhetorical question – of course he knew – but he nodded anyway. “So why do you think that it’s a good idea for me to have such a stressful job?”

“Well, don’t you usually have them at night? This isn’t Werewolf Capture, you won’t have to work at night if you don’t want to.”

Lavender groaned. Sometimes Seamus could be really dense. “Right now, yes, they are,” she said. _“Usually._ Not always.” He opened his mouth, and she added, “And that could change if I’m under a lot of stress. That’s what the Healers said.”

Granted, the Healers seemed sure that she would barely be able to function out of St. Mungo’s at all, and she was doing all right for herself, all things considered. However, she didn’t think that it was wise to challenge them on something like this.

He did not look concerned. “Lavender, sitting alone in this flat recording prophecies might not be stressful, but it’ll still make you crazy if you let it.”

“I’m taking it slow.” Her voice wavered a little – she was tired of being bored, but the idea of having to go out and face all the people and their stares and everything else was just so overwhelming that boredom felt like a much better alternative.

“Do you really want to be stuck _here_ forever?” he asked.

“No,” she said resentfully. “But you just don’t understand.”

That was the problem with her friends. She loved Parvati and Seamus, but they’d both managed to get through the war without being seriously disfigured. They didn’t have serious emotional scarring or panic attacks. So what did they know?

They kept telling her that she needed to have some _structure_ , to try to move on with her life. She didn’t disagree with the goal, but they acted like it was _easy._

And it wasn’t. Not even a little.

He glanced at the heavily curtained window. “No,” he admitted. “I don’t understand. But I don’t need to understand to know that this—” he cast an eye around the room “—isn’t good for you.”

Lavender sighed. “What’s the department for?” she asked, as much to distract him as anything. This was not a new argument.

It worked. Seamus sighed and ran a hand over his face. “Dangerous creatures are becoming a huge problem.” Despite herself, she could feel her heart start to beat more quickly, and for once, it wasn’t out of panic. “There’s no division that can deal with them right now.”

To her surprise, Lavender found herself beginning to entertain the idea. She wasn’t doing herself any favors by moping around at home without anything to do, and there was something that oddly attractive about fighting monsters.

She was done with dark wizards. Monsters, though – monsters were something different. She had certainly disliked Care of Magical Creatures lessons, but that was mostly because Hagrid had kept insisting that some of the most dangerous creatures in the world were as harmless as her old pet rabbit Binky. She had taken the class expecting to learn how to take care of magical creatures like unicorns, not the monsters Hagrid had inflicted on them. She’d liked Professor Lupin’s lessons just fine, and once Hagrid had stopped trying to get them to feed the damned Blast-Ended Skrewts, she’d been perfectly happy dealing with them, too.

“Come on,” Seamus said, and she blinked her eyes once to refocus them. He was grinning. “Admit it. You’re tired of sitting around doing nothing.”

“Yes.” He opened his mouth, and she hastened to add, “But Seamus, I’m really not great under pressure. Not since…” she trailed off, and felt a shiver go through her. Rational thought took over, and she sighed. There was no way that she could hope to handle that kind of pressure right now. She shook her head as a wave of disappointment washed over her. “Seamus, not right now. I can’t.”

After a moment, he seemed to accept that, and they had a perfectly nice visit. Inside, however, Lavender was thinking.

Something needed to change.


	3. Sunlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lavender decides that something has to change.

It was late at night, though you would never have known it from the light emanating from the glowing orb on the bedroom dresser. The night was silent and still. The noise from the street was blocked out by strong charms, but even if it hadn’t been, there was nothing loud enough on the pavement below to reach the third story window.

Despite the quiet, the girl on the bed was not sleeping peacefully. She was tossing and turning, and after a moment, her eyes snapped open. She grabbed her wand and spun over to face the door in one panicked motion.

No one was there.

She flopped back down onto her bed, still clutching her wand so tightly that her knuckles were white. The nightmares had mercifully become rarer over the last several months, but she still slept fitfully, and she still awoke terrified and drenched in sweat once or twice a week.

But an improvement was better than nothing, and Lavender no longer needed the break of dawn to fall asleep.

That was progress.

* * *

It had been more than three months since Seamus had asked her to join his new division – or whatever it was called – at the Ministry, and in that time, Lavender had done a lot of soul-searching. She’d also done a lot of sitting on her hands, and she knew it; she was just in a rut that she couldn’t seem to shake herself out of.

Intellectually, she wanted to get out of it. Emotionally, she wanted to get out of it. It was draining her of any confidence or optimism she’d managed to cobble together since the attack. It was leaving her feeling slowly but surely more dead inside by the day.

It was leaving her paralyzed.

Where she kept bumping into trouble was the how. She wanted out. She wanted to rejoin the world and start to do real world things.

But she didn’t know where to start.

She felt overwhelmed every time she started to think about the logistics of the thing. Where could she possibly fit? She hated people staring at her face, and the idea of sitting at a desk every day made her want to crawl into her bed and never get up again. After all of it - the war, the battle, her recovery - how could she go back to drudgery? There were more important things in the world than the Department of Magical Transportation or Quidditch regulations or diplomacy.

Not that she'd ever been very good at diplomacy, anyway. If there was one thing Lavender Brown had always been, it was partisan.

And now that she'd experienced the war, and her closest friends had dedicated their post-Hogwarts careers to fighting evil, she couldn't go back to pretending that there weren't monsters lurking behind the corners – or was it just pretending that they didn't matter and couldn't possibly hurt anyone?

The wizarding world had started to forget. They had convinced themselves that it could never happen again, and that dwelling on the past did no one any good.

Lavender would never forget.

But she didn't know whether she could take working in the field, either - or whether she'd ever be able to take it. The panic attacks had gotten better, but they hadn't gone away, and if anything was likely to set her off, it was some creature trying to tear her throat out.

And that was the worst possible time to be set off. She would be a liability to the people around her, which was bad, and she might get someone killed, which was worse.

So she was stuck.

And she didn’t have a pressing need to figure it out. She’d been seriously wounded in the war. She could reasonably make the case that she needed the Ministry to support her for the rest of her life, and she was fairly certain that no one would argue with that – especially not after her time in St. Mungo’s.

She didn’t want that, but it did take away the feeling of urgency that she might have had otherwise. No matter how big the pit in her stomach felt when the Ministry official dropped off her monthly allowance and no matter how painful the shame that washed over her was, the bottom line was that she wasn’t starving.

That took away some of her motivation. Not all of it, of course, but enough that she was taking her time about everything, and that was its own problem.

\---

In the end, it was Seamus who decided her.

The trouble with Seamus was that he didn't know when to quit. Lavender had never figured out whether he was really that dense or whether he just didn't know how to take 'no' for an answer, but either way, he'd been dropping not-so-subtle hints about the D.C.B. since he'd first brought it up a few months before.

"Come on," he said one afternoon, leaning against her kitchen counter as she poured herself a glass of water. "It'd be good for you. You've always been good with magical creatures. Remember the skrewts?"

"Unfortunately." She held out the glass, and he shook his head.

"I'm fine, thanks." He cocked his head to the side as she sat down at the table. "Come on. Just try it."

"I'll think about it."

"Well, you've been thinking about it for months. Think faster."

Lavender felt a flash of irritation. "I'm sorry my near-death experience and panic attacks are so inconvenient to you."

Even Seamus couldn't miss (or maybe just pretend the miss) the sarcasm, and he answered it in kind. "And I'm sorry that I don't know where you're coming from, having never had a near-death experience myself."

She looked down at the table and tried to convince herself that going for her wand and hexing one of her only real friends would probably be a bad idea.

Besides, she was out of practice, and he wasn't, so he'd probably just get her first, anyway. That would be demoralizing.

"Making me feel bad isn't going to make me do what you want."

"Well, being sympathetic hasn't done it, either, so I thought it was time to switch tactics."

Sometimes, Lavender really hated Seamus. Not often, but…

He left shortly thereafter, leaving her feeling more than a little sour, not least because she knew that he was probably right. She really hated it when he was right. 

She spent the rest of the day alternating between moping and considering the offer.

Maybe this was the only way for her to learn to swim.

When she woke up the next morning, it was almost noon. As soon as she left her room, she took out a piece of parchment and wrote three words on it. Before she had the time to regret what she was doing, she tapped it with her wand.

It disappeared.

Just as she expected, Seamus was knocking at her door by mid-afternoon. When she opened it, he said without preamble, “You will?”

She steeled herself. “Yes.”

Her voice didn't waver, which she was thankful for. The last thing she needed was to come off as incompetent.

Seamus immediately started to talk about what the job would entail, in details that Lavender found excruciating at the moment. This was already a huge step – a terrifying step.

“Seamus.”

Miraculously, he closed his mouth.

“I need to get cleared by the Healers first. _And_ I need to be hired by the Ministry. Just because you want me doesn't mean they'll hire me. They'll take convincing. And I'm _still_ not sure about how I'll do in the field. How do you know I won't just have a panic attack?”

This was a conversation they'd already had many times before.

“You'll figure it out. You always will.” He jumped to his feet. “I'll go clear it with the Minister now.”

For all that she'd been the one eschewing most human contact since the end of the war, sometimes it felt like Seamus was the more naïve of the two of them.

“Just like that.”

“Well, the division is important. I mean, it was partially his idea.”

Lavender didn't doubt that the division was important, but she did think that the fact that they'd chosen Seamus – who, while quite capable, was still only a few years out of school and had next to no experience managing anyone – to head it spoke volumes about where it was on the Ministry's priority list.

She chose not to say that. She didn't have it in her to dampen his enthusiasm, especially since he was the one continually trying to pull her back out of her flat and into the world. He was much better at it than Parvati.

Lavender loved Parvati dearly, but she thought that sometimes Parvati could be a bit _too_ sympathetic. Seamus wasn't shy about pushing her. She didn't particularly like it, but it probably was what she needed at this point.

Sometimes what was fair could get in the way of the end goal. Lavender had been learning that the hard way.

“Yes, but surely the Minister has other things to do. You shouldn't just barge in.”

“Oh, fine. I'll send an owl. And I can go clear things with St. Mungo's.”

“They'd be pretty bad Healers if they clear me on nothing but your say-so.”

“If I leave it up to you, will you go?” She hesitated a moment too long. “I'll tell Parvati to drop by and go with you. Tomorrow?”

Lavender sighed. “Fine. Tomorrow.”

When 'tomorrow' dawned, however, she decided that she didn't much want Parvati to babysit her while she went and talked to the Healers. She sent an owl to ask if the Healer who she saw the most was available that day, and received an answer within an hour giving her an appointment time and a room.

There was enough time to owl Parvati, too... but she didn't. She had to get used to being in public sometime.

Going to St. Mungo's reminded Lavender of everything she hated about going out in public. Even when she approached the front desk at St. Mungo's, she saw the look on the witch's face before she smoothed it over and greeted Lavender with a smile.

She'd been quick about it, at least. But it still hurt.

After she'd been given a visitor's badge, she made her way down the stairs and toward Healer Jamison's office. After being cleared by another receptionist who also blanched at her face – and was less adept at hiding her surprise – she took a seat in the room she'd been directed to.

Jamison swept in a few minutes later.

“No Seamus or Parvati today?” she asked.

Lavender shook her head. Her hands, she realized were clenched very tightly. Her interlocking fingers were beginning to hurt.

“What brings you to see me today?” Jamison did not comment on what Lavender was doing with her hands. She had seen far worse, and from Lavender herself.

“I...” 

There was no good way to say this.

“I want to go back to work.”

Now the healer did look surprised. “Really?”

“Well, not back. I guess just... to. I want to start working.”

Jamison smiled. The smile lit up her face, which, while not especially _pretty,_ was quite pleasant and comforting.

She was a good healer. Lavender liked her. And she liked that she wasn't especially pretty.

“I think that's a wonderful idea, Lavender. Do you have any ideas?”

“I was thinking the Ministry.”

Jamison nodded. “That's an excellent idea. What department?”

Lavender knew that the conversation was about to get difficult. “Well – um – the D.C.B.” Jamison frowned, and Lavender hurried to say, “It's this bureau that's going to deal with dangerous creatures -”

“I know what it is.” Jamison pursed her lips together. “I don't mean to discourage you, but are you sure that that's a good idea? I was thinking something part-time, quiet, to help ease you back in...”

“I know. But... I don't know. I want this.”

They sat in silence for a minute. Lavender felt her heart beginning to race. Jamison was going to turn her down, and she wasn't sure whether she was disappointed or relieved.

“Who's heading the division?”

“I – well – Seamus. He's the one who offered me the job.”

“Ah.”

“He thinks I can do it.” Lavender didn't know why she felt so defensive. She still wasn't sure that she wanted to take this job after all.

“Does he.” It was not a question.

“Well... yeah. I don't know why. You'll have to ask him.”

Jamison did just that. Lavender wasn't sure what Seamus said – he and her healer talked on a different day, when she was nowhere near St. Mungo's, and neither was especially forthcoming with details.

It must have gone fairly well, though, because that conversation seemed to help Jamison reconcile herself to the idea, though it took several more conversations before she was willing to clear Lavender for duty.

By that time, Lavender had talked herself into wanting the job. She wanted it desperately.

When the Ministry finally hired her, it was more of a relief than she'd ever imagined it would be.

This was where she needed to be.

She would never be the same. But maybe she could be someone else.

Someone new.


End file.
